>In North America any adult that is not the parent is a potential kidnapping rapist

But the adults at the sleepover are the same as the adults that watch the kids during daytime :/

>In Canada, child services were called on a mother of three for letting her children play outside in their fenced backyard while watching from the window.

When I played in the sandbox my father could not see me from the house. Just our dog, and the dog would watch me :) So if he saw the dog he know I was ok.

We don't deserve dogs.

> In Canada, child services were called on a mother of three for letting her children play outside in their fenced backyard while watching from the window.

If I did not know any better, I would be tempted to read that as satire. Ensuring a child's safety is obviously one of the most important duties of a parent, but there is such a thing as common sense.

When I was a child (German, in case it matters, born in 1980), we were given a lot of freedom to go where we wanted (within reasonable limits, of course), as long as we followed a few simple rules. Mostly, don't go alone, tell the parents where you go and when you will be back. So there was always a certain degree of parental oversight/control, but it did not really feel that way. In hindsight, I think it was important that these rules were applied fairly. Breaking them usually meant we got grounded, but as long as we kept our part of the bargain, we enjoyed a lot of freedom. At least after we learned about safety in traffic, which both my parents and the elementary school spent a lot of time on.

> In North America any adult that is not the parent is a potential kidnapping rapist

That suspicion is there against many single dads too.

This is true elsewhere too though. There have been a number of cases in NL, one involving a day care employee having raped over 80 children (some infants); after that a huge amount of male day care employees were fired. Similar story with a swimming instructor.